The invention relates generally to an adjustable seat back belt positioning juvenile booster car seat that folds compactly for easy transportation, thereby reducing shipping costs as well as physical space requirements at the retail level.
Passenger restraint systems in automobiles are generally well suited to properly restrain adults but not well suited to properly restrain children. Accordingly, vehicle restraint systems must be supplemented by devices such as booster seats, which may be broadly defined as a seat that relies primarily on the vehicle's lap and shoulder belts to retain the seat in the vehicle and to restrain the child's torso. These seats include a seat portion to elevate the child above the vehicle's seating surface to a position in which the vehicle's shoulder belt is better positioned on the child and which properly positions the vehicle lap belt on the child's torso, and may also include a back portion. A common construction technique for booster seats with backs is to mold the seat and back portions from rigid plastic and cover them with a cushion or pad.
Known booster seat designs suffer from several drawbacks. First, the large L-shaped bodies tend to be relatively expensive and difficult to mold in one piece, especially if the seat includes wings and a lap belt path. Additionally, these booster seat designs suffer from a large size which is difficult to ship, store, package for manufacturers, and difficult to store and transport for consumers.
The manufacturing expense associated with a rigid molded body derives from the complex molding process required. One solution is to mold the seat as a plurality of separate, less complex, pieces and assemble the separate pieces into a rigid whole. Unfortunately, molding the seat as separate pieces requires additional tooling to mold the separate pieces and adds assembly steps, both of which add to the cost of manufacture. Thus, the savings due to less complex molding is offset by increased manufacturing and assembly costs and the seat is still large and bulky.
Therefore, what has been lacking in the industry is an easy to manufacture L-shaped car seat which is easily collapsed or foldable from an L-shaped position to a more compact position for ease of transportation and storage, yet which can be similarly, easily unfolded to its L-shaped use position.
Additionally, what has been lacking is the ability to further elongate or contract a car seat back to more accurately match the height of an occupant's head and shoulder with appropriately molded head restraint components of the seat back and shoulder belt path while maintaining a complete back support. Typically, the industry adopts a one-size-fits-all approach, which does not maximize the safety of the occupant by adjusting the seat size to fit the occupant. Those which adjust the headrest do not adjust the back, thus leaving an open area with no support. This disadvantage is eliminated by using the design of the present invention.